Maddie Meyer/Getty Images
We may never know the extent of the relationship Jimmy Garoppolo had with Tom Brady for the three-plus years he was in New England, but all indicators suggest they weren’t riding tandem bicycles on the weekend.
There have been reports claiming that Brady never saw it as his role to mentor the young quarterback, and others declaring that Brady asked the Patriots organization to trade Jimmy G.
What’s done is done, and Jimmy certainly can’t feel too much hate in his heart, especially after leading the hopeless 49ers to a 5-0 end of the season and securing a five-year, $137 million contract with the team–$7 million more annually than Brady, for what it’s worth.
In a recent interview with Bleacher Report, the 26-year-old Eastern Illinois product gave us a better sense of the two quarterbacks’ relationship.
After practice, the two quarterbacks would often play the bucket game, which requires landing a football into a trash can in the back corner of the end zone. “There would be days where one of us would win and you wouldn’t talk to the other for a little while,” Jimmy says. “We’d be fine the next day, but it was one of the best things for me. We would push each other and we got two Super Bowls out of it…
“The competitiveness between the two of us was very similar. If I’m playing my best friend in one-on-one basketball, if we are both into it, by the end, we are going to hate each other,” Jimmy says. “That’s how it is. All the good competitors have that. We got along, but there were always times where we wanted to kill each other. It was a healthy, competitive relationship.”
Garoppolo told Bleacher Report’s Joon Lee that he had no shortage of confidence entering New England and that mindset would lead to the dethroning of arguably the greatest quarterback of all-time.
“Even when I was a little kid, my brothers, whenever we would play, I would literally always think I was going to win. I wouldn’t, but I would always think that. It’s like when I go to New England, when I first got there, I thought in my head, ‘I’m better than this dude.’”
“But in your head, you believe you’re better than Tom Brady?” I ask.
“It was always a quiet confidence,” Jimmy says. “I would never speak that.”
I ask again: “But you believed that you were the best dude there?”
“Yeah, you believe in yourself,” Jimmy says. “That’s the best way to put it.”
I check his confidence one more time: “So you’re going up to Tom Brady and saying, ‘I’m better than you’?”
“I’m not stupid. You have to pick your battles, but I had belief in myself that I could do certain things, and it’s always worked out pretty well. It will always be in me, that drive that comes from my dad telling me that someone is always working harder, that I’m always in last place and I need to catch up to someone else.”
That type of confidence will make you the highest paid player in the NFL.
[h/t Bleacher Report]